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| The upcoming Intel Core Ultra 270K Plus has once again popped up on Geekbench. |
If you’ve been holding out for Intel’s next big desktop leap, the latest Geekbench listing might feel a little familiar. The upcoming Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, part of the rumored Arrow Lake Refresh lineup, has popped up once more in the benchmark database—and the numbers tell a story of incremental gains, not revolutionary change.
With boosted clock speeds and a handful of extra efficiency cores, the performance jump from the current Core Ultra 7 265K to the new 270K Plus appears, unsurprisingly, modest. For PC builders eyeing an Intel upgrade in the near future, this refresh might be more about refined specs than raw power.
What’s Inside the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus?
According to the latest industry whispers and this new sighting, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus will feature a 24-core configuration: 8 performance cores (P-cores) and 16 efficiency cores (E-cores). That’s four more E-cores than its predecessor, the 265K, alongside a slight 100 MHz bump in both base and boost clocks.
The test system paired the chip with a Gigabyte Z890 Eagle motherboard—a board currently priced around $210 on Amazon—and 64 GB of DDR5-4800 memory. You can dive into the raw benchmark data yourself via the Geekbench 6 listing here.
The Numbers: A Small, Noticeable Uplift
In Geekbench 5, the 270K Plus posted a single-core score of 3,235 and a multi-core score of 21,368. Stack that against the 20-core 265K, which typically scores around 3,065 (single-core) and 20,613 (multi-core), and you’re looking at a roughly 5.5% single-core uplift and 3.7% multi-core improvement.
It’s a gain, yes, but not a dramatic one. As noted in a detailed breakdown over at TechPowerUp, these early figures align with expectations for a refreshed architecture rather than a brand-new generation.
Why This Refresh Matters—And Who Should Care
Given that Intel’s next major desktop architecture, Nova Lake, isn’t expected until later, Arrow Lake Refresh is poised to be the company’s 2026 mainstream offering. For anyone building a new Intel-based system in the coming months, this will likely be the chip on the table.
That said, with DRAM prices currently skyrocketing, the total cost of a new PC build is becoming a steeper investment. Pairing a high-refresh CPU with ample fast memory will hit the wallet harder than in previous years.
The Bottom Line
The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus looks to be a sensible, spec-bumped evolution of Intel’s current desktop lineup. It offers a few more cores, a bit more clock, and a slight performance nudge—enough to keep the platform competitive but not enough to make current-gen owners feel left behind.
If you’re curious about the motherboard used in the test, you can check out the Gigabyte Z890 Eagle on Amazon. And for a deeper technical analysis of the chip’s capabilities and clock behavior, this TechPowerUp report covers all the nuances.
For now, Arrow Lake Refresh seems to be exactly what its name implies: a polish, not a overhaul. Whether that’s worth your upgrade dollars will depend on how badly you need those extra efficiency threads—and how deep your pockets are in today’s market.